A Grave Undertaking Read online

  Lionel White

  A Grave Undertaking

  ***

  From Kirkus Review

  An ungentlemanly League of Gentleman’s attempt-to pull off a big bank robbery-is organized, synchronized and effected-through a mortician’s establishment and with the necessary props-a hearse, a cortege and a body. However the corpse which is secured-that of a nameless man-has a genuine claimant, his daughter, and her attempt to find her father’s remains alerts a second attempt to find her and this pursuit, by her fiance and a newspaperman on his first case, breaks the crime for the police. Clever and catchy.

  ***

  DEDICATION

  This book is for Mike N. - an unmelancholy mortician.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.

  Shortly after eight o’clock on the morning of May fifth, a Monday, the body of an elderly derelict was discovered propped in the doorway of a tenement house, just south of the Bowery on Stanton Street, on the East Side of New York City.

  The uniformed sergeant of the prowl car who made the discovery conducted a cursory examination. The man had been dead for several hours. The fact that no one had reported the death failed to surprise him. The man’s head had fallen so that his face was concealed and he could have been merely another drunk who had passed out from the cheap sherry he had been drinking. An empty pint flask was clenched in the corpse’s gaunt hand where it lay on the cement step at his side.

  The sergeant beckoned his partner who still sat behind the wheel of the patrol car and when the second policeman stepped to his side, instructed him to put in a call for an ambulance.

  “Tell them he is dead,” he said, his voice without emotion.

  The intern who arrived with the ambulance realized at once there was no need to use his stethescope, but he made the check in any case.

  “Heart, I should imagine,” he said, standing up and signaling the ambulance driver to bring the stretcher.

  “Booze,” the sergeant answered laconically. “It’s always the booze.”

  He was right, of course.

  The body was removed without causing any undue commotion and as soon as it arrived at the morgue in Bellevue, a check of the dead man’s possessions was made. His pockets yielded an empty wallet, some twenty-eight cents in odd change, two soiled handkerchiefs, a crumpled cigarette package containing two cigarettes, a safety pin, and a worn newspaper clipping.

  The clipping was so old and tattered that it was almost impossible to tell from what paper it might have come or how long ago it had been printed. But analysis under a glass established that it concerned a scientific discovery made at a Midwestern university laboratory some three years previously. This might have been a clue to the dead man’s identity had the article carried any names, but it did not. On the reverse side of the clipping was an ad for a patent medicine and this too might have been considered the reason that the dead man had the fragment of newspaper in his pocket.

  There was an old-fashioned, plain gold ring on the third finger of the left hand. It was obviously a wedding band, but upon its removal, it proved to be so worn that whatever engraving might at one time have been on the inside had completely disappeared. Examination of the teeth showed that the dead man wore a complete upper plate and a partial lower. He had two platinum fillings in the pivot teeth in his jaw and the dental work had been expensive. There were no scars on either the head, limbs, or torso and no unusual physical characteristics. The autopsy surgeon estimated the man’s age in the late sixties, he was five feet eight inches tall, weighed a hundred and twenty eight pounds, was probably Caucasian and had obviously been suffering from extreme malnutrition. Cause of death was acute alcoholism.

  There was nothing at all unusual about either the corpse or the method by which the dead man had become a corpse. In short, merely a case of another Bowery bum-a wino, a sneaky Pete drinker-ending up dead in the inevitable gutter.

  It happens every day.

  A routine report was made to the Bureau of Missing Persons; the patrolman on the beat where the body had been discovered was supplied with a morgue photograph and instructed to check out as to whether the man had a room or apartment in the neighborhood. Certain flophouses and cheap hotels also would be checked in case the dead man had resided in any of them, but the fact that he carried no key in his pocket or any sort of identification discouraged any optimism that the results would be anything but negative.

  Actually, no one really expected to discover his name or much of anything else about him. No one really cared. The death, in a sense, was “natural” and if he cleared with missing persons, then very obviously it was just a routine case of another down-and-outer reaching the end of the road. The end would come when the city buried him in Potter’s Field, after the passing of a certain legal interval of time.

  By midafternoon the Police Department had instigated its routine procedures, photographs and fingerprints had been taken and sent to the proper sources for possible identification, the autopsy had been completed.

  The cadaver was reassembled with the aid of a few surgical clamps and some silk medical thread and consigned to a slot in the cold storage vault.

  For purposes of identification, the number Z-12-77 was typed on a card and pushed into a cellophane holder which was tied to the large toe of the right foot.

  To all intents and purposes the case was closed.

  2.

  Shortly after eight o’clock on May fifth, a Monday, a midtown New York City undertaker who was facing bankruptcy, compromised with his conscience and made a decision. The decision resulted in a telephone call and this telephone call was the initial step in the series of carefully laid plans which resulted some seven days later in the quarter of a million dollar robbery of the Upper West Side branch of the Citizen’s National Bank.

  The undertaker’s name was Mario Gallucci. He was forty years old, tall, thin and with a sunken face. He had lost most of his hair, his eyes were very dark and deep-set, his ears were too large and he had a bony, slightly twisted nose. His demeanor was one of perpetual melancholy.

  Mario Gallucci decided on that Monday morning to meet his destiny halfway. In fact, a little more than halfway. He telephoned his cousin, Joey Gallucci, at a delicatessen down in Chelsea, where Joey had an arrangement with the management to receive his personal phone messages. Joey did a little side business as a bookmaker and found the delicatessen phone booth both a convenient and reasonably safe spot from which to operate.

  Joey, a short, fat, good-natured man with the doughy face of a comedian and the physical contours of a Kewpie doll, was ten years younger than his cousin. He was partial to silk shirts and large plaids, suede shoes and hand-painted neckties. He moved in a constant miasma of expensive perfume. His tiny hands were beautifully manicured and in the right one was invariably a cigar, in the left a scratch sheet.

  He was eating a salami sandwich on rye when the owner of the delicatessen leaned out of the phone booth and called to him.

  “Your cousin, Joey,” he said.

  Joey dropped the sandwich and picked up the cigar and his wide mouth split open in a grin. His small black eyes were like twin raisins in an ocean of dough.

  He had to edge into the booth sideways and it was still a 1 tight fit. But he was careful to close the door before picking up the dangling receiver and speaking into the mouthpiece.

  “Joey,” he said. “This you, Mario?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a decent interval and Joey waited until he I realized that Mario apparently was through talking. “Well,” he said, “what gives?”

  “I’ve decided,” Mario Gallucci said. He spoke in the voice of doom.

  “So?”

  “So all right, I’ll go along.”

  Joey breathed a long sigh of relief. He didn’t realize it, but he had started sweating the second he’d entered the phone booth. He carefully took the receiver away from his ear, and dropping the cigar which he held in his other hand, reached for his breast pocket handkerchief.

  He wiped his forehead.

  “Tell Earl,” Mario said.

  “Don’t worry-don’t worry, kid.” Joey sighed again and then smacked his lips. “We’ll be along,” he said. “About an hour. You sit tight.”

  “Sure,” Mario said. “Why not-I got nowhere to go.”

  They hung up simultaneously.

  Joey stepped out of the phone booth and again wiped his brow. He walked over to the counter and reached into an opened box and took out a handful of cigars.

  “Gotta go out,” he said. “Guess I won’t be back until late, maybe not at all today.”

  “Whatcha want me to say should anyone-” Bobby, the cashier, began, but Joey cut him short.

  “Tell ‘em I gone to Miami, tell ‘em to go to hell, tell ‘em anything,” Joey said. “I’m retiring for a while.”

  Bobby stared at him as Joey turned and started for the door, hesitating only for a second to bite off the end of the cigar and spit it out.

  He stepped into the cab sitting at the curb and gave the driver the address of a rundown theatrical hotel in the West Forties.

  3.

  Billy Dale yawned voluptuously, stretching her bare arms over her head and kicking the sheet so that she uncovered herself from the waist up. She blinked quickly several times and her cornflower eyes opened wide, staring sightlessly for a moment at the dirty gray ceiling.

  Next to her she felt Earl Cradle move slightly. A soft sigh escaped from his partly opened mouth. Pushing herself up on one elbow,
she half leaned over him, reaching for the package of cigarettes that lay on the night table on his side of the bed. The Venetian blinds over the single window in the room were drawn but she knew that it was well along in the morning. The sun, escaping between the slats, made slender parallel lines across the foot of the double bed.

  Her hand had found the cigarettes and she suddenly gave the short, double cough which punctuated the first few minutes of each of her waking mornings.

  Earl exploded out of his sleep, his body rising as though activated by a steel spring as he sprang up, the sudden movement toppling her back. His right hand had started for the gun under the pillow, even before his eyes had begun to open and his other hand blindly clawed at her. Once more she had forgotten, forgotten how he always awakened. Forgotten his unconscious, self-protective violence upon being startled out of slumber.

  “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “It’s all right, Earl. Please��� you’re hurting me.”

  For a moment he stared at her unseeingly, and then his eyes focused and his lean, hard body relaxed and his hand fell away. He dropped back on the bed. The air was expelled from his lungs in a long-drawn-out sigh.

  Billy leaned over him again and found the dropped package of cigarettes.

  “Someday,” she said, “you’re going to go right through the roof.”

  “Someday, you’re going to learn not to startle me.”

  “You were sleeping,” Billy said.

  “That’s the only time I can be startled,” Earl said, a little pointlessly. He turned on his side and smiled at her, his eyes half closed in his unshaved face. His hand reached out and he caressed her thigh. “Gimme a puff,” he said.

  She handed him the cigarette, leaning over him and brushing his lips with her own.

  “No wonder you’re nervous,” she said. “This waiting. It’s beginning to drive me a little nuts. I’m tired of just sitting around. Here it is almost noon and we’re still in bed. Seems all we do is eat and sleep.”

  “Waiting is always the tough part,” Earl said. “Anyway, what’s so wrong with sleeping?”

  He reached out, putting out the cigarette, and then turned back, reaching to pull her toward him.

  She tried to wriggle away.

  “Earl,” she said, “at this hour. It’s positively indecent.”

  He moved closer, the stubble of his chin roughing the side of her smooth white cheek and his hand found what it was seeking and again he sighed. She started to speak again, no longer resisting him, but he quickly covered her mouth with his own. It was like it always was, the moment his lips pressed against her partly opened mouth, and her soft body went limp and complacent against the tight hardness of his. She moaned and her arms went around him, pulling him tight.

  His breath came faster and he twisted, shifting his weight so that she felt the length of him against her.

  She started to say something in a half whisper, her lips against his ear.

  He moved his head and again his lips found hers and it was then, as the rhythm of their love was beginning, that the jangling of the telephone at the side of the bed shattered the silence and the moment.

  Earl Cradle used a short, violent word. His hand went to the instrument and he said, “Yeah?”

  He listened for a second and then turned and quickly spoke to her, under his breath, with his hand over the mouthpiece.

  “Joey,” he said. “At last.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed and then the smile came. “Thank God,” she said. “At last-thank God.” She started to move away, unconsciously pushing against his bare chest.

  Earl tightened his grip on her and at the same time turned back to the phone.

  “Call back in twenty minutes,” he said. He listened for a moment and then repeated himself. “I said twenty minutes, damn it.”

  The receiver banged down and he turned toward her.

  “But, Earl,” Billy spoke quickly. “It’s Joey. I can be out of here in three minutes. Don’t make him wait. We’ve been waiting too long already.”

  “A few minutes more won’t hurt, baby,” Earl said. “Besides, right now, the most important thing in the world���”

  Again his hands found her and she sighed and pulled him close.

  ***

  Earl Cradle was sitting on the edge of the bed in his T-shirt and a pair of slacks, barefooted, rolling a brown paper cigarette in his left hand, when the telephone rang again. He flipped the completed cigarette into his mouth and took time to light it before reaching to the night table and picked up the receiver.

  He listened for a minute and then said, “Come up.”

  He dropped the paper to the floor and turned to Billy, who sat cross-legged in the only chair in the room. She was a tall, handsomely built blonde, in her mid-twenties. She sat staring at the floor, her startling blue eyes half closed and a pensive expression around her lush, rather large mouth. She had not looked up when the phone rang and she seemed completely lost in some private dream of her own.

  “Joey is coming up now,” Cradle said. “You better blow, kid. Call me later.”

  Slowly she lifted her head, staring at him blankly. Her mouth twisted and she smiled, simultaneously uncrossing her legs and standing up.

  “Earl,” she said, “what did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything, kid,” Cradle said. “But it must be set or he wouldn’t be here. Anyway, you better���”

  “But, Earl,” she said, pouting again. “Why can’t I stay? After all, I am going to be in���”

  “I know, I know,” he said quickly. “But I think it’s best I see him alone. Let me find out what it’s all about. You run along now and I’ll call you later.”

  She stepped toward him and leaning forward, brushed his cheek with a kiss.

  “How later?”

  “As soon as I know what’s on his mind. Now���”

  “All right, Earl,” she said. “But call me. I’ll be in my room.”

  “I’ll call.”

  She moved quickly then, picking up her bag where she had dropped it on the bed and pulling her jacket together. She paused for a second as she passed the dresser mirror and her finger touched her mouth and then her hair.

  Two minutes after she had closed the door there was a soft knock and Earl Cradle called out, “Come in.”

  Joey didn’t waste any words.

  “It’s set,” he said. “We got it made. Mario called me downtown. He’ll go along.”

  He crossed in front of Earl and fell into the chair which was still warm from the heat of the girl’s body. His face broke into a pleased smile as his eyes remained on the face of the other man.

  For a moment or two, Earl Cradle stood completely still, his eyes half closed and his thin-lipped mouth opened enough to expose the edges of his even white teeth. And then his lean, angular head nodded slowly. He smiled and suddenly he looked ten years younger, looked like a man in his early thirties. He released a deep breath and not speaking, went to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer. He took out a half-empty bottle of Canadian Club and filled two water glasses half way and handed one to Joey. Lifting his own glass, he spoke in a low, husky voice.

  “To the Citizen’s National Bank,” he said. “To your cousin Mario. To us. To money.”

  “To the neatest caper that will ever be pulled in this town or any other town,” Joey said.

  They drank.

  4.

  Shortly before eight o’clock the morning of May fifth, a Monday, Jake Epstein, latest addition to the general assignment staff of the New York Blade, was given a lesson in basic journalism by a past master at the craft. The teacher was Carlton Dewey, day city editor of the Blade, a hard-bitten, old-school newspaperman. Dewey was a bitter, sardonic, completely efficient martinet who had no use for the new type of journalists being graduated by the universities. He didn’t mince his words.

  “How old are you, son?” he asked.

  Jake Epstein blushed. He was standing at the side of the city desk, in the center of the editorial room and there were at least thirty people within earshot. He had worked for the Blade for only three months and it was his first newspaper job.

  “Don’t you know?” Dewey asked, not really giving Jake time to fumble for his answer. “I’m twenty-one, sir.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir,’ God damn it!” Dewey said. “Pull up a chair. Sit down. Do you think I want to yell?”